The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

She laughed now, and I didn’t like her laugh.

“They even had me tossed out of jobs where the boss was paid to take me on. A bought position in a sixth grade store. Even the slimy employment agents, who send you to a job or hire you for one, take it out of a girl’s pocketbook or her body. Yes, I found the same graft in the East Side sweat shops. All my life the law has taken things from me — even to that real love in the orphanage, when I was a child. A memory. The one decent thing in my life. But why try to make you understand? Honesty? Why, honesty is simply avoiding or evading the law. You can buy a job in the city today — from the position of the meanest worker on the city dump, to a judge-ship of even the higher courts. Well — I’m through.”

“Easy does it, Florence.” I knew what a woman she was when she worked herself up into one of these fits.

“Easy does it! That’s what you tell me. But through the months you let me sit night after night in this lonely room. I loved you then. Maybe I love you now. I don’t know. But I hate myself for it. I had you come tonight because I thought... well... just pride. I looked at myself in the glass. I’m still The Flame. I’ve still got the same active — and, yes — maybe criminal mind; still the same beautiful body. You can’t deny that. Now — what do you want me to do with it. Sit here and rot it out in this dirty dive? Sit here — for what? So that you can come in to me during my old age, and tell me that you’ve bought me a bid to the poorhouse? The poor-house! Why, you’ve even got to have money or influence to get into it.”

I’d seen The Flame bad before, but never quite like this. Rudolph Myer was right. I shouldn’t have come. But still, if I had known the truth — known exactly how I was going to find her — I’d have come anyway, I suppose. But I simply said:

“I didn’t think you wanted me, Florence.”

“That’s a lie,” she said, very calmly. More dangerous for that calm I thought. “That’s a lie, Race. You knew I wanted you — and I wanted you tonight. I wanted to look at you again. I’ve been living in a dream, but Myer let me know the truth. You bought and paid for half the rotten jobs I worked on. He didn’t tell me in so many words. He didn’t have to. And, Myer—” she stopped, flashed those bright, keen eyes on me now. “Well?”

And that “Well?” was a stickler, you got to admit.

“Florence—” I tried the “soft words turneth away wrath” business. “Why don’t you be a good sport? You and I have played the game together — faced death together. Just a couple of good pals. I’ve got some money. Let me give you a stake, until—”

“Just chums!” And her laugh was like finger nails along a wall. “I suppose you’d want me to show you a good behavior card every month; report in person to Rudolph Myer once a week; hit the sawdust trail and shake a tambourine down in the Bowery! And all this while you go around with a gun in your hand and the peculiar idea of personal ethics which allow you to knock over some gunman and trust to the city to give him a decent burial. No — I don’t want your money. When I take something I give something in return for it, and—”

“Such as this.” My hand had fallen upon the table and rested on a small object that dug into my palm. I picked that thing up now and held it out to The Flame. I’m no jeweller, you understand, but the thing I held was a ring — and the diamond in it was large and real.

“Yes.” The Flame cocked up her chin. “Such as this.” She snatched it from me, looked at it a moment and shoved it onto a finger. “Such as this. You want to know why I brought you here tonight? Well — I wanted to tell you this. I wanted to look at you again and know. Now — I’m through. The city doesn’t want honest citizens. There are dicks right on the Force today who opened car doors for me and touched their hats when they knew I was riding high in the rackets, who have insulted me when I was straight. Politicians — public office holders — and perhaps even a big criminal lawyer, who you—” She stopped dead, pulled open the drawer of her desk and tossed a roll of bills out to me. “That evens it up. There’s every penny, as nearly as I can figure it out, that you spent to keep my brain straight and my body—” She shrugged her shoulders, stepped back and looked at me. “You don’t like that line, do you?”

“No—” I said, “I don’t. It’s cheap stuff. And by ‘a criminal lawyer’ you don’t by any chance refer to Rudolph Myer?”

She laughed. But she ignored my question.

“I’ve tasted the virtue of poverty and didn’t find it palatable. Now — I’m through. I’ve a chance. I’m going to take it.” She looked straight up into my eyes, and those brown glims of hers were brilliant. “And I’m not starting over. I’m not building up something. I’m to meet a mind that is like mine — brilliant, quick, active. I’m starting in again. Starting in at the top of the ladder.”